In the travel and airline industries a significant fraction of all tickets that are issued by airlines and other travel service providers are reissued at least once before travel on the ticket is completed. Changes that are requested by travelers include changing flights, dates and routes possibly to/from a new travel destination or origin. If revalidation of a ticket to accommodate a relatively simple change is often possible, reissuing a ticket is always a complex and time-consuming job that must be handled by a skilled travel agent.
Among the practices and tools in use by airlines and travel agencies to reissue a ticket some are said to be flight-driven. Their use implies that traveler has first to decide on all the characteristics of the new desired journey, i.e.: origin, destination, every via point (that may be different for outgoing and incoming parts of a return journey), flight number of each travel segment, dates and times of every flight. Given this information, a priced solution that must also fit the change conditions set by the first issued ticket can generally be returned. However, to achieve this, a large or very large number of travel possibilities must always be considered by the travel agent in an attempt to satisfy the end-user request. On top of being a time consuming operation this does not always provide the cheapest solution. The process lacks of consistency since the result is highly dependent on what travel agent considers for reissuing the ticket.
Ticket revalidation, which does not require the issuance of a new ticket, can apply only when minor changes such as flight changes or date changes are requested. Like above, revalidation process is flight-driven. It first checks if the change requested can actually be accommodated which does not prevent travel agent from having to try numerous possible routes and flights though. Finding the cheapest solution is not guaranteed and is highly dependent on travel agent skill and experience too. This latter must also make sure that the change conditions attached to the first issued ticket are actually observed.
Another category of tools for reissuing a ticket are said to be fare-driven. If those tools are devised to return the cheapest solution this is however obtained at the expense of ignoring, if not all, at least most of the change conditions which are published as standards by the airline industry. Indeed, those tools are generally limited to collect a change fee.
According to airline industry standards, the change conditions for a fare are published through scenarios. A scenario contains two kinds of constraints: the change restrictions and the pricing method to be used.                The change restrictions specify which changes are allowed regarding the new dates, origins, destinations, routes and flights. They include criterions such as: the fare category present in the original ticket; the passenger type; if the change is requested before or after passenger departure; if the change is requested before or after flight departure; the destination point; the change penalty.        The pricing method specifies how to price the new journey; in particular, which fares are to be used on which part of the journey, i.e.: fares valid when the first ticket was booked and fares valid when the change is requested. Examples of pricing methods currently specified are shown in table (100) of FIG. 1.Airline standards assume that changes are carried out according to the process flow as shown in FIG. 1. Namely, the requested changes are checked against the change restrictions (110). According to the result of the checking, the pricing method to use is selected (120) allowing to build a priced change solution (130) that indeed meets the change conditions of airline standards (140).        
Reissuing and, at a lesser extent, revalidating a ticket is thus no simple matter. It requires skilled travel agents and it is a time consuming, thus a costly activity for airlines and travel agencies.
On the other hand, with the ever-growing use and spreading of the Internet, most of the airline companies offer now the possibility of booking a trip and buy an airline ticket directly from their web servers without the need of visiting a travel agency. There are also a lot of specialized travel web sites, or online travel agencies, that give the opportunity to the end-users of those sites to buy travel tickets directly. Incidentally, in both cases, the ticket is most often ‘de-materialized’ (e-ticket) since no real ticket is ever issued and customer has just to show up to the airport airline counter with an ID e.g., a passport, to get its boarding pass. The amount of tickets issued through this channel is growing very rapidly. Irrespective of the fact tickets are ‘de-materialized’ or not they are equally susceptible to be changed while there is no actual possibility offered of reissuing a ticket from those web sites.
It is thus a broad object of the invention to overcome the difficulties, here above discussed, of reissuing and revalidating a travel ticket while meeting the change conditions imposed by airline industry standards through an automated process that does not have to rely on the expertise of a travel agent.
It is also an object of the invention that this automated process returns an exhaustive list of travel opportunities all meeting the requested changes and from which a traveler can pick a preferred solution.
It is a further object of the invention that returned travel opportunities always include the cheapest available opportunity.
Further objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the following description in reference to the accompanying drawings. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.